made possible by a grant from the george w and laura l bush foundation: now with less irony

Property Rights

Because government-induced flooding can constitute a taking of property, and because a taking need not be permanent to be compensable, our precedent indicates that government-induced flooding of limited duration may be compensable. No decision of this Court authorizes a blanket temporary-flooding exception to our Takings Clause jurisprudence, and we decline to create such an exception in this case.

The Court also rejected the government’s assertion that the Army Corps of Engineers needed to be free from the constraints of the Takings Clause in order to effectively do its job:

Time and again in Takings Clause cases, the Court has heard the prophecy that recognizing a just compensation claim would unduly impede the government’s ability to act in the public interest. We have rejected this argument when deployed to urge blanket exemptions from the
Fifth Amendment’s instruction. 1

This is worth reading: at one point Kennedy likens the Government’s position to the “old moral refuge” of German rocket scientists who said “I make the rockets go up; where they come down is not my concern.” ↩